Hey everyone! I have been working hard to make Galactic Mining Corp even greater! Thanks to your amazing feedback and suggestions I have added another set of fixes and additions.

Here is whats in this patch...

• Added a second control method. Several users with hand related injuries/problems have stated that extended play causes them discomfort. I want to do everything I can to make Galactic Mining Corp fun for everyone. Now you can switch to "Auto drill" mode in the options menu. This will make the drill automatically follow the mouse, when the left mouse button is held down you will stop until you release the button.
  
• Crit strike has had a make over. Hitting a crit will now cause damage to some surrounding tiles in front of your drill. A crit strike will cause (base drill damage + crit damage) to the tile being drilled and crit damage to surrounding tiles. This affects tiles, crates and chests!
  
• You can now hit crit strikes on chests and crates.
  
• Crit stike chance increased by 30%. You will see many more of them. I also increased the size of the crit strike visual effect.
  
• New Tooltip added . You can now mouse over tiles and items in the end of mission screen to see the names of the tiles and items.
  
• A large amount of optimisation should reduce frame rate issues when drilling large planets with tons of powerups.
  
• Reduced the cost of Mighty Obelisk of Research investment site by a considerable amount.
  
• Fixed an issue where having to much money made your cash turn negative. Capped at 2 Billion.
  
• Fixed the confusing wording of the Sunset Silo. It now refers to crit damage in its description.
  
• Fixed several sound effects not applying the player chose SFX volume
  
• Fixed a strange issue causing some chests to be empty in the explore screen
  
• Corrected a load of spelling mistakes
  
• Fixed an issue where giant worm would spawn twice in same place.

Hotfix (later the same day) - Anyone who had their cash turn negative before the above patch should now be pulled back into the positive when first entering the HQ screen. Sorry to anyone who got stuck in negative for a while. I hope this is now fixed for you all.

Again I want to thank you all for the most amazing release. Its been an absolute joy speaking with you all about the game and its amazing to see how much people are enjoying the game. Thank you!!!

Happy drilling and much love

Anthony
Windybeard

Last week I mentioned that I would give you some more information on how the strategic map interacts with the node system, which I will be doing today.

As it stands, “discovery” in the game is based solely on the player walking across the island by themselves and visually detecting interesting things (chest, ore, pirates). Once found, the player has to remember where they found it, and has to track back to that location if they want to engage with it.

While this will continue to be the case for the very early game, the new strategic map will come in once you place a military HQ. The strategic map will show you the terrain of any explored parts of the island (including the parts you’ve explored before placing the building), giving you information about where to set up defences or be wary of ambushes - where canyons can create a dangerous path or overlooking hills will provide a strategic advantage. Once placed, the military HQ will also allow you to send out scouts to help you with exploration, both to chart areas that are unknown, and to keep track of opponents on an ongoing basis.


(This image shows the current state of a partially revealed map - a little "rough around the edges", but this is how it will work in general)

Resources like trees, rocks that can be broken for stone, fruit trees, etc. are represented as icons on the map to help you get a better understanding of the land and what it has to offer. Resources that spawn randomly will also be shown in this way, e.g. fruit trees, so you will automatically see their locations if you or one of your scouts have gotten close enough (Today's main image shows an area with forest, some fruit trees, and some rocks).

A more important thing to discover, however, are the ore veins across the island. At the moment, we have rock, iron, gold, and gem veins, and finding one of them can seriously influence decisions about the location of players’ expansions, what type of goods they will produce, or where they choose to defend. Considering their importance, we wanted to not simply have the type of ore vein revealed as your scouts track across the world, but instead, scouts will only reveal that there *is* a type of mineral vein in a location. Once such a location has been marked, the player can visit the location themselves, discovering what type of vein they have found, and make a decision about what to do with it.


(This image shows a "spotted" chest between some rocks, as well as an a spot in which an unknown ore type can be found)

(The same image, with the ore vein having been revealed to be a gold vein by the commander)

Finally, there may be spawns of pirates or of chests across the world. Both of those will be revealed by scouts or soldiers, if they have direct line of sight on them (we wouldn't want to give away some of the more hidden chests simply because a scout was within 100 metres of it), or can alternatively be revealed by the commander themselves, if they look directly at it and press a key to spot the chest/pirate.


(This image shows 2 pirates having been spotted in a valley with an iron ore vein)

For chests, the location will obviously remain the same until the materials from the chest are collected. However, pirates or enemy soldiers will move around the map freely, which means that the icon on the map will only ever track the last location in which a pirate/soldier has been spotted. As a commander, it will therefore be your responsibility to make sure that the information you have is not too outdated, or to make your plans while keeping in mind that an enemy army may have moved since you last saw it.

Most of this functionality (minus the scouts) is already working in our development build, and I am thoroughly enjoying testing it - especially checking out what nodes have spawned when I see the red crosses for their locations!

Until next week!

1. Fixed an issue that caused some users to be unable to open the workshop interface.
2. Optimized the UI display of some functions.

Early Access version 2021-06-06 changelog

- New option: Hard Mode - that you can toggle anytime on the title menu - featuring a challenging battle difficulty similar to the initial release.
- Fixed the shops UI getting stuck when exiting - as reported in the discussions.
- A few more bugs fixed.

Time goes by, work is in full swing, we add a drop of kindness to this cruel Maya's world.

Greetings, Magnates!

Last time I talked about getting the market simulation up and running. One big remaining task here is balancing, which affects the whole in-game economy. What should buildings cost? What should the upkeep cost? How much should products pay when sold? And so on. It's going to be a huge, ongoing effort to make sure everything is reasonably balanced. But, to balance things, all parameters must be known. And they are currently not.

One of the parameters is energy (power). Some buildings will require energy to work. So I've started implementing the new energy system, and all the basics are in place and done; energy is currently generated only by solar panels, energy is stored in capacitor banks (homage to Minecraft mod Ender IO) and energy is then relayed wirelessly through energy nodes. Any energy consuming building in range of an energy node will receive energy automatically.

I need to add more energy sources, and, again, balance everything. How much energy should this and that produce, and how much energy should this and that consume, how fast should energy flow between buildings? Etc. It may not sound like a big deal, but it is. As the game designer I want to strike that perfect balance where the player needs to put some thought and effort into the energy system, but not too much because then it just becomes an annoying element, but also not too little because then it just becomes a superfluous and thus annoying element..

Anyone saying game design is easy clearly hasn't tried it.

Anyway, moving on to the next parameter: research. There will be a tech tree of some sort, but I haven't settled on a model yet. Either way, I want to add a bunch of unlockable augments you can apply to buildings. One augment could increase mining speed at the cost of increased energy consumption. Another augment could decrease energy consumption but increase the upkeep cost significantly. With each augment and/or other possible unlockable modifiers I have to consider how I'm going to offset that in other parts of the game, making sure there's not an obvious route to "easy mode".

Right, I should also mention that my intention is to reward the player with research points based on how much money they allocate to research.. soo yeah, yet another factor that affects the economy. And everything else, really.

This is one of the reasons it takes so long to make a game 😄

I'll leave you with this recent gif and the changelog:

• Added solar panel building.
  
• Added capacitor bank building.
  
• Added energy node building.
  
• Implemented proper energy flow/production/consumption.
  
• Added proper finance history, implemented build cost and upkeep.
  
• "Finished" the market window, at least for the time being.
  
• Various UI work.
Until next time!Fey at Rising Tail

1.更新了部分任务重复出现的bug。
2.更新了部分任务角色消失的问题。
3.对擂台进行了大型调整。
(1)擂台由两次一次调整为1日一次，但奖励降低，获得的经验和金币也降低。
(2)新增加5级擂台挑战。

Fixed the mid-race standing positions bug, and another cause for the rare no-wing respawn bug.

v1.0.10f1

• Fixed: standings positions incorrect from after the first lap until before the final standings
  
• Fixed: item selection weights sometimes incorrect (e.g. leader picking up straggler items)
  
• Fixed another rare cause for respawning without wings
  
  Tracks
• Fixed a respawn point in Mountain Pass
  
• Fixed: a respawn point in Mineshaft was very far behind its checkpoint

-Fixed some bugs with quest saving and loading
Save files should be compatbile with previous version.
I swear that if I find more bugs I will give up on this. And as a note, everything I find is small and obscure, it won't most likely impact your playing experience so I could just not fix it, but I want to, but it's so hard to figure out what's wrong.

Hello everyone!

New Slormite Chronicle for our second month anniversary and we have lots of good things to share!

First thing first, we have our largest patch to this date coming next week. We've been working on quite a lot of things that we are going to talk about below and detailed Patch Note will be released with the patch.

Also, because we've changed the engine and because various things might break the game, we are going to deploy this patch on the Experimental Branch at first so we can make sure everything is working properly. The Experimental period should not last long if everything works properly.

If you're interested in checking the new patch on the Experimental Branch, please do so. Your feedback matters a lot.
Especially, if you have a 1440p or 4k screen, we need to know that everything is working properly. ːsteamhappyː

Game Engine Migration

So we've decided to update our Game Engine to a more recent and more powerful version (we moved from GameMaker: Studio 1.4, to GameMaker: Studio 2). We felt that the sooner was the better since we believe that most issues preventing players from entering the game were related to the engine and fixing these issues were our top priority.

Migrating from an engine to another prevented me from working on new features hence the long hiatus. However, I've had to rework multiple systems to make the game work with the new engine so I took the chance to upgrade a bunch of things.

New Settings

• The Slormancer now supports 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 resolutions.
  
• Windowed Full Screen is now a thing.
  
• You can change the monitor where the game is displayed.
  
• You can customize FONT SIZE.
  
• Also, fonts should no longer appear blurry/fuzzy on various resolutions. It should be nice and sharp.
  
• You can lock the cursor to screen.

For other resolution settings: 21:9 (and above) support will come later. Due to a pretty rigid UI, I have to rework a bunch of things to make it work but we feel like we've already spent too much time working on technical stuff and not enough on content so we'll switch to content for a while for now.

Balance Changes

We believe that it is too soon to make small changes and tweaks on individual Upgrades, Passives or Skills unless they are widely overpowered so we mostly worked on general things such as Equipment as a whole, and mostly targeted specific stats such as All Damage Reduction.

We are not going to detail everything here, as we'll post a detailed patch note during next week. However, here's what you can expect:

• The most important changes are on Equipment. We like how Crafting works in The Slormancer, however it is detrimental to the excitement of looting new gear. So we're introducing a new genre of stat, called "Pure Stats". This is basically a critical roll of a stat on gear.
  
• These can be found on looted equipment but cannot be rolled by Friedrich. Also, if you modify the score or the stat itself at Friedrich's it will lose its Purity and turn back to a regular stat.
  
• Every stat on an item can be Pure, so you can loot an Epic Item with up to 7 Pure Stats.
  
• The difference between the perfect roll of a stat and a Pure roll is between 1% and 10%, so nothing crazy, but quite noticeable.
  
• We also have plans to upgrade Pure Stats chances and scores, but we'll talk about it later.
  
  
  
  
• Items can no longer roll the same stat twice since. The original purpose was to increase the possibility and the number of combinations on each item but it did the opposite, and players tend to just stack the same stat over and over.
  
• Reinforcement now offers diminshing returns. +1 Reinforcement gives a +15% bonus, +2 gives +14% bonus, up to +15 and above granting a +1% bonus to the Reinforced stat. That is instead of the former Reinforcement that granted +15% bonus to stats, at any Reinforcement level.
  
• We've made changes to how Slormelines work during Reinforcement. Players tend to completely bypass the Potential mechanic at the later stages of the game, which was obviously not intended. Instead of giving +10% Chance on items of equal rarity, Slormelines now work for every item regardless of rarity with different rates. The Normal Slormeline now gives +0.1% Reinforcement Chance, Epic Slormeline now gives +15% Reinforcement Chance etc...
  
• We've also reduced the value of some stats that were easily stacked on items, such as Critical Strike Chance or All Damage Reduction.
  
• We've made a lot of other changes but I feel like I'm writing the patch note all over again, so I'll just talk about the most important changes:
  
• Projectiles can no longer Pierce AND Fork. A Projectile will try to trigger the highest stat first, and try to trigger the second stat only if the first has failed. This change was made so you actually have to pick one of these options (or a little bit of both) and build around it. Same as how you can build around Overdrive or Inner Fire but not both while playing Melee.
  
• If you are a Mage using Arcane Clones: Skills cast by Arcane Clones now cost you Mana as if you were casting them. We really love Arcane Clones but we just feel they are just too strong all around. Especially because they can cast Skills with the most expensive Upgrades without batting an eye.

Other Changes

Mastery Changes
The following changes were made to keep the original idea of using the actual Skill you want to upgrade but also to offer players an alternative to slowly but passively upgrade other Skills.
It should now also be easier to try out a new Skill from the start and level it quicker once your level is high enough:

• Characters will now gain a permanent +2% Mastery Gain per level so gaining Mastery gets easier over time.
  
• Every time a Skill gains Mastery, other equipped Skills will gain a small portion of Mastery as well.

Enemy Changes
We've had lots of feedback talking about how easy the game is or how dumb enemies are.
We hear you. But right now, Enemies and Breaches are still missing a good amount of important features that will make the overall experience harder, so we feel like now is not the time to drastically change their behavior.

However, we do feel like Melee enemies (The Skeleton Soldier and The Rogue) are not oppressive enough (or should I say, AT ALL), so we've increased their Movement Speed, their Cast Time and their Attack Speed by quite a bit (if you're a new player, these changes are made throughout the first Act, so you can still get the basics at a comfortable pace).

So once the 0.2 build is stable, we are going to focus on adding content for a while. We know we've been working on fixing bugs and technical features for too long and it is now time to add fun stuff!

While working on the 0.2 version, we've made progress on our upcoming Major Update. We have everything sorted out, we now need to move everything into production.

We're happy with what we are about to offer but I can't share much more about it yet. However, I've managed to sneak into the dungeon and take a few pictures of the upcoming enemies.
They will introduce new, and hopefully fun, mechanics.





That's about it!
We hope you enjoy reading these posts!

Next week is patch week! See you then!